Van Dyck u like

Celebration is in order by the 10,000 people who helped save for the nation the self-portrait by Sir Anthony Van Dyck that stares quizzically from its splendid Baroque frame, looking, as it happens, rather like Bernard Hepton. Let us hope the nation goes to see it at the National Portrait Gallery, though not all at once. Thanks are also due to buyers of lottery tickets, who, facing impossible odds, raised the £6,343,500 contributed via the Heritage Lottery Fund. The 10,000 donors who gave £1.4 million did so through the Art Fund. This splendid organisation, once known as the National Art Collections Fund, had its first victory in 1905, buying for the Tate Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold. That was the picture which Ruskin called “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. But the public liked it, as they have liked Van Dyck, and in neither case were they wrong.